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Booze Review: Myanmar Beer

You know you’ve entered drinker’s territory once your flight lands in Yangon and you order yourself a Coldilocks. By default, you’ll be served a 640ml bottle of Myanmar Beer. XL style… oh yeah. If you want to be a baby and nurse a standard 12oz. bottle or can, you’ll have to ask the waiter or waitress for one. Shame on you.

The brewery’s presence is everywhere you look. From the glowing pub signage in Mandalay to the branded vinyl banners used to patch up holes in remote thatched huts, the slogan I ❤️ Myanmar is simply ubiquitous. I guess we can view this as a proud display of Corporate Social Responsibility and Patriotism?

In the rural farming villages of the Shan State territory, you can count on the local general store to be well stocked with room temparature Myanmar Beer – even if they’re out of the water you were looking for after the first half of your day’s 12 mile trek.

This is the best beer I’ve had in Asia. It’s amazing cold, and it’s great warm. Hell, in Myanmar, modern day luxuries such as refrigeration are so hard to come by that I was enjoying the hot beers I had to sip on too.

“Hello” translates to “Mingalabar” in Burmese. MingalaBAR is going to be the name of my first Myanmar beer bar in the United States. Don’t steal my idea. You won’t be able to pull it off anyway.

Myanmar Beer is just perfect, and it deserves my first perfect score for its taste, style, novelty, and dependability to be the only consistently comforting food/drink item I could count on in a land with some very progressive? culinary customs (see photo below).

5/5 suds.

-S

Photo: A large Myanmar Beer on draught. I thoroughly enjoyed this mug of beer with a side of crispy crickets pictured above. (18th Street Night Market, Downtown Yangon, Myanmar).